Rev. Jenny Shultz
Trinity Sunday, Year B
May 31, 2015
In the movie Still Alice, actress Julianne Moore plays a world-renowned Linguistics Professor at Columbia University who suddenly finds herself forgetting things, getting lost, feeling less and less like herself when she receives the diagnosis: She has a rare genetic form of Alzheimer’s disease, early onset with little to no treatment options before her.
Several months into her diagnosis Alice is asked to give a speech at the Alzheimer’s Awareness gathering where she quotes poet Elizabeth Bishop saying, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master, so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster”. She goes on to say, I am not a poet, I am a person living with early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and as that person I find myself learning the art of losing every day.
Losing my bearings, objects, losing sleep, but mostly losing memories. All of my life I have accumulated memories, they have become life’s most treasured possessions….
Everything I accumulated in life, everything I worked so hard for, now all of that is being ripped away. As you can imagine, or as you know, all of this is hell, but it gets worse.
Who can take us seriously, when we are so far from who we once were?
Our strange behavior and fumbled sentences change others perceptions of us and our perceptions of ourselves.
We become ridiculous, incapable, comic, but this is not who we are… this is our disease.”
Last week, millions of people across the globe celebrated together, one of the church’s most memorable days, our Birth, scriptures were read in thousands of different languages, bright red flags, banners and burning flames were used as the pronouncement for such an occasion. This is a day within our community when the church is invited to become re-enchanted by her birth rite, to reclaim the significance of her existence, and literally to become a blaze of fire-burning HOPE in the world re-energized for the work that lies ahead. And with flames rising to the sky, tongues of all nations speaking the truth, engrossed in the cloud of witnesses that has sent her to this destiny, the church forgets for a moment the encroaching shadow, forgets for a moment the present by which she has become entangled, forgets for a moment the disease that would have her forget who she is, what she knows, from where she has come, and most importantly the memories that have brought her this far.
Some contemporary theologians, bloggers, pastors, media personalities like to claim that the church is in decline, that the church is facing her ultimate demise, that the church is indefinitely dying- often quoting statistics such as these: “Of the 250,000 Protestant churches in America, 200,000 are either stagnant (with no growth) or declining. That is 80% of the churches in America.
4,000 churches close their doors every single year.
There is less than half of the number of churches today than there were only 100 years ago.
3,500 people leave the church every single day.
Since 1950, there are 1/3rd fewer churches in the U.S.
And I can add to these from our very own UCC Statistical Profile:
From 2000 to 2010 alone, the UCC encountered a net loss of 696 congregations and 318,897 members… and counting.
In preparation for this post-pentacostal Sunday, often observed as Trinity Sunday I was reading through the texts as I often do waiting to find some kind of thread to be revealed, one that would weave the greater story together one puzzle piece at a time, that would at least circumvent the need to address Trinitarian theology whatsoever- some kind of metaphor that was inclusive of both the prophetic witness found in Isaiah’s revelation and the nucleus of the entire faith narrative that is revealed in John chapter 3 between Jesus and the pharisee. First, we have Isaiah whom Patricia Tull tells us is the only figure to cry out, voluntarily in response to God’s call, in the scriptures: “Here am I, Send me!” “Isaiah, Unlike Moses with his myriad excuses, is hardly able to contain his excitement, waving his hand like a student raring to speak up in class. In a very few strokes the story paints a prophet who, despite discouragement, remains eager to mediate between God and his community, and then turning a few pages I continued to John’s gospels where Nicodemus, the Pharisee, though completely ignorant of the spiritual insights of the gospel, seeks Jesus out in the middle of the night only to ask about about being born again?!” You can’t make this stuff up…! These are Billy Graham, run down the aisles of the football stadium kinds of moments! Needless to say, the metaphor that flashed scenes upon my memory filled mind was not one of jam-packed football stadiums or Jesus rock concerts where baby boomers met Jesus for the first time, were saved by grace and then dunked in the river out back. No, what filled the space in my brain was that of disease, decay, of a church inhibited by the tangled mess we have become, caught in the web of forgetfulness, void of the exuberance of our youth, somehow unreflective of a people born of the spirit.
In light of our current context, where the headlines typically read of death and disaster, violence, hatred, and exclusion, environmental catastrophes; where Storms and tornadoes claiming lives, and threatening water shortages in the NorthWest are plastered across pages alongside politicians calling for the term “climate change” to be banned, When education is becoming less a right and more a privilege or as former BB&T President John Allison would have it, “a commodity that will be bought and sold by students and donors alike,”
I asked myself one question:
Is the church, in fact, dying?
I remember as a child visiting my great-grandfather after he had been diagnosed with alzheimer’s disease. Prior to the dementia he was as kind and gentle a soul as you’d ever meet, always greeting you with a smile and a hug, sometimes lifting you off the ground he was so happy to see you. Ready with pockets full of that old dime store penny candy, breathing so close to your face with that big teeth-filled grin you could always smell his fresh minty spearmint gum breath, and rearing, he was, to go no matter the time of day. He used to sweep us up in his lap and read us stories the kind bound with the golden seal-, then we’d have lunch- usually nothing too tasty, and then all three of us would pile onto his riding lawn mower…which moved at just a half a second quicker pace than his old bones… he’d ride us up to the lake where we’d feed the ducks, whistle with the cat tails and listen to the frogs croaking by the bank. Afterwards we’d head back down to the house where grand daddy would then tell us to be quiet, and then he’d take a nap… surely we weren’t quiet, but it never seemed to bother him.
One visit after the dementia set it I remember him accusing my older brother of stealing his pocket candy, and then he got all freaked out when seeing me because he thought I came out of the television, that I had been the little girl on the commercial he was watching. He no longer looked at us with those kind and knowing eyes, but with fear and skepticism, as if he had completely lost those memories that fueled our giant hugs, filled our stories with laughter and sticky bitter candy with the sweet fragrance of his love. It was hard to watch him die, to become a shadow of the man he once was....
I know that the church is a far cry from a person, such as Alice or my great-grandfather, living with alzheimer’s disease, a horrible fate to befall anyone, and that to even make the comparison may seem less than sympathetic, but I think there are some important insights that we can learn in seeing ourselves both as the church that “we know we are”, and the one that the world is perceiving – as possibly losing everything...caught in the slow decline of this disease brought about by our culture, one with perpetual lies that entrap, and then suffocate with its polluted identity brought about by living from flesh to flesh.
Alice said in her speech, “Everything I accumulated in life, everything I worked so hard for, now all of that is being ripped away. As you can imagine, or as you know, all of this is hell, but it gets worse.”
Church, Who can take us seriously, when we are so far from who we once were? Our strange behavior and fumbled sentences change others perceptions of us and our perceptions of ourselves. Looking back at our birth, recalling the labor pangs that brought us into existence, and encountering the many call stories, like that of Isaiah, David, Hannah, Ruth, Moses, Mary, Paul, of those champions who fought to bring truth and light to the next generation should inspire us to look for the substance that Jesus says to Nicodemus is of water and spirit. To be willing to crawl back into the womb to seek that which is clothed in darkness yet has the potential to erupt with light, to understand what it is to be flesh of flesh and spirit of spirit. Church, when will we stop reading the headlines and start making them, stop succeeding the answers to those most willing to give them, when will the last door slam in our face?
Another form of Alzheimer’s to which I encounter with each and every visit to the country- back to Kentucky where my grandparents farm has been for all of my life - is very different than how I remember it affecting my great-grandfather. Now my grandmother, his daughter, is struggling with this disease, but this time it is a silent engulfing, an eroding poison that not only took her speech, and all ability to communicate, but it has taken her physical body as well, withered down to just 75 pounds from the plump, round-faced farming grandmother that I remember she lies in a bed 24 hours a day, in her home where my aunt, and grandfather care for her with the assistance of home health providers. This time, though, the memory-milking disease rendering her body entirely helpless, lacking all that might tell the world that she exists has left something for all of us.. her kind eyes, her knowing looks, her gentle tilting of the head that tells you she is “in there”, and “she is alive”- though not physically present, her spirit is deeper than deep, and fuller than full. She has a knowing glance that lingers, haltingly so, that calls you into her presence, that summons your spirit to kindle with hers, that is spirit of spirit.
Alice said in her speech “for the time being I am still alive, I know I’m alive. I have people I love dearly. I have things I want to do with my life. I rail against myself for not being able to remember things. But I still have moments in the day of pure happiness and joy, please do not think that I am suffering. I am not suffering I am struggling to be part of things”.
Church, we are more than Alive! And though we may be struggling to be a necessary part of the fabric of our society, we are Alive. And how do we know we are alive??
Because
Just this week After a Cleveland police officer was cleared of all charges in the shooting death of an unarmed couple, a coalition of clergy, including UCC national leaders, rallied with a call for reform of the city’s criminal justice system.
We know we are alive
Because when the same political forces that recently cut 48 majors, most dealing with education, from the UNC system forced the closure of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity and threatened Gene Nichol over 100 professors signed on in support of him as did most of the Chapel Hill- Carborro clergy ministerium.
We know we are alive bc: Last week Ireland became the first nation in the world to approve same sex marriage by popular vote. And- As the United States Supreme Court is under way hearing arguments about the legality of same-sex marriage, UCC advocates and executives pray for the inevitable—with 37 of the 50 states now recognizing marriage equality, it’s time for a national decision declaring equal rights for all people.
Church, How do we know that we, the church, are alive today, and more importantly that we will be alive tomorrow?
Just as Nicodemus asked Jesus in that late night encounter,
How can someone be born again after growing old?,
it’s time that we, the church, ask ourselves this same question… It is never too late to be born again, to live anew in response to the call of God… to listen to Jesus’ response and take seriously the call to be born of the spirit. Are we ready to respond to this call as the prophet did? To proclaim truth to a world that if left to disaster and disease would be only a fading memory unable to recall her birth, to live vitaly in the present and look to a hopeful future?
Are we ready to be born of the spirit?
Jesus said, "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Thomas Berry so gently reminds us that “The real skill is to raise the sails and to catch the power of the wind as it passes by.”
My prayer is that we, too, will raise our hands, and respond to the call, saying “Here am I! Send me!”
May it be so, amen.
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